Treasures from Our West: Colorized postcard of Sitting Bull

Originally featured in Points West magazine in Fall/Winter 2015

1904 colorized postcard of a ca. 1887 photograph of Sitting Bull

Likely the best-known American Indian of his time, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1885 after long attempts by William F. Cody to recruit him.

As noted in the Wild West program of that year written in the hyperbolic prose of General Manager John M. “Major” Burke, the two famous western personalities greeted each other with mutual respect and awe, and a long handshake. Burke recounted, “For several seconds they eyed each other. It was a truly dramatic spectacle and entirely unrehearsed in its striking effects.”

Despite the auspicious greeting, Sitting Bull remained with the Wild West only four months before returning home. He was killed on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota just five years later. This colorized postcard, dating to 1904, is clearly based on a black and white image taken nearly twenty years before, and embellishes Sitting Bull’s “native” accoutrement.

Sitting Bull, ca. 1887; colorized postcard, 1904. MS 71 Vincent Mercaldo Collection. P.71.968

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